Chapter Twenty-Three
Ava tried very hard not to cry on the walk home, but the problem with trying not to cry was that it made one feel all the more deserving of it, and so she’d only half succeeded as she stepped from the bustling clatter of Williamson Square down the quieter streets – tears dripping intermittently from her jaw to her coat collar as she threaded her way back home through the city.
Miss Lillian was right. Not everyone got the sort of ending one read in stories – the sort of love that made people launch a thousand ships, or strike a knife through their heart.
She’d believed that readily enough before Jem had proposed, for she’d reached the age of twenty-two without anything remarkable happening.
Without streams of letters being delivered in the dead of night, or dashing young gentlemen knocking upon the door and asking her father, very politely, if they might take her for tea.
It had been easier to pour her focus into her art, into her act, to subsist on the kind of love the audience could give her, the watchful eyes, the shock, the wonder.
And it had been tolerable. It had all been utterly tolerable until Jem had leaned over that table, and opened a door she had tried very hard to keep shut.
And then suddenly she had begun to wonder whether she was one of the special few who got the story.
Who found the sort of love her mother and father had had. Whether she was one of the lucky ones.
And that was where she had gone wrong.
And now? Now Miss Fairchild was right. Ava was pathetic – and worse, she was foolish to think she could mend what she’d shattered.
As she waited for a gap in the carriage traffic to cross the road, she saw the doors of the inn opposite burst open. Four men tumbled from it – and it wasn’t until a dark-haired man scrambled to his feet that she realized she recognized him.
And that coat.
And those boots.
It was Damien.
‘Give it back,’ said another man. He was built like a bull, and reaching to clasp at Damien’s collar. ‘You give it all back. Right bloody now.’
‘I played fairly, and I won fairly,’ Damien replied, turning to spit blood onto the pavement. ‘It’s not a gamble unless someone stands to lose.’
‘Very well,’ said the bullish man, landing a punch squarely across Damien’s cheek that Ava heard land – and before she knew what she was truly doing, she was across the road, and standing between the two of them.
She couldn’t strike them. She knew that much – and nor would she be able to persuade them to walk away, not if he had their coin in his pockets. And so she did the only thing she could think to do. The only thing she could do.
She rounded on Damien.
‘You,’ she said, trying to pour some of the hurt, the pain, the vitriol she’d felt that afternoon at the theatre into her voice. ‘How dare you make those promises to me and then disappear! You said we would go to London. To Paris.’
Damien blinked at her, utterly bewildered, his mouth agape. ‘I—’
Ava slapped him. She hadn’t intended for it to be hard, although perhaps she’d miscalculated, for she could feel the stinging pain of it in the palm of her hand.
‘Out of the way, lady,’ murmured a second man, who was almost entirely bald. ‘You can have your turn with him when we’re done.’
‘I think I shall have my turn now, before he slinks away again,’ said Ava, all of the blood thudding into her face.
It was the same coiling tension she felt on stage – the moment she stepped out beneath those bright lights, and felt every eye in the room swing towards her.
It felt like walking herself to a cliff’s edge, pushing herself further and further until she could see the drop that awaited her on the other side, could feel her stomach twisting with it.
She’d spend the entire show walking back and forth along that very edge, and it would only be the audience – their attention, their belief – that would stop her from falling.
And so when she felt that familiar curl of fear deep in her bones, she did what she did on that stage. She stuffed Ava Adams, and all of her worries into a box – and firmly closed the lid.
‘Did he lie to you, as he lied to me? Hmm?’ She rounded on Damien once more – who was dazed, but still standing, and looking more confused by the second. ‘You promised yourself to me in front of witnesses. In front of God. And then you – what? Ran away?’
Behind her, she heard the bullish man begin to chuckle. ‘Maybe we watch this play out first,’ he said.
‘Sod that,’ said a third man – all long limbs and sharp, jutting bones. ‘That man has our money.’
Ava laughed. ‘Money? He’s barely two pennies to rub together!
Although of course he didn’t tell me that until we’d stood in front of the priest. Good sir, I assure you – all his promises are paid in false coin.
’ She clutched his coat in mock fury, trying to steady him.
‘You told me I had a voice like velvet. You told me that you would love me forever. Was that all a lie, too?’
There was a crowd forming now. She could see them drawing closer – women with their shopping baskets, men with their briefcases. That was what she’d hoped for. What she’d wanted.
‘I know the ring you gave me wasn’t your mother’s,’ she continued, her voice teetering on the verge of shrill. ‘I know it, because when I tried to sell it they told me it was paste. Paste! And look – now he has nothing to say to me! Not even one word.’
She looked at Damien, and he at her, his lips opening and closing rapidly.
‘I’m … sorry?’
‘You should be more than sorry,’ said Ava, glancing at the crowd, willing more people to join them. ‘You should be begging my forgiveness. Begging me to let you back into the house!’
‘Miss.’ The bull-like man grabbed her arm, and Damien surged forth with a fury she did not know he held within him.
‘Leave her out of this,’ growled Damien, shoving the man back.
‘Yeah, you leave her be!’ called an elderly woman from the crowd. ‘Clearly she’s suffered enough!’
‘Disgraceful,’ muttered one of the men to her left. ‘Hounding a girl on the streets. Your mothers should be ashamed of youse.’
‘Someone run for the constable!’
‘Yes!’ agreed Ava, her hands shaking now, her voice too – though whether it was from the fear, or the sheer madness of the whole thing, she did not know – her breath sawing in her chest. ‘Run for the constable. And when he gets here I shall be turning over my husband for being a sorry liar, and a cheat, too!’
The skinny man placed a hand upon the other’s shoulder. ‘Leave it, Walter,’ he grumbled. ‘S’not worth dealin’ with peelers over it.’
The balding man stepped close to Damien. ‘You come in this pub again and we’ll skin you. You hear me? We’ll skin you.’
‘Oh, he won’t be coming back here,’ said Ava, sliding her arm through Damien’s and marching them determinedly through the tight press of people who had clustered around them, though she kept her voice raised. ‘No, I shan’t let you out of my sight again. You’re to give up drinking.’
One of the women who stepped back to let them pass murmured in agreement.
‘You’re to come back to church. And you’re never to step foot out of line again. Do you hear me?’
‘I … hear you?’
‘Good,’ said Ava – walking them away with her chin held high until they could turn the corner, and duck into one of the alleyways tucked back from the street.
She followed it, dragging Damien with her, winding with it back and forth until the sounds of people and carriages had faded, until they were alone in the cool gloom.